Category: Reading

Summer Reading: O Pioneers!

A hard-back edition of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! rests on a table.
O Pioneers! is worth the read.

Ah, summer. Since quitting work to stay home with the kids and then returning to school full time, I get the comparatively rare adult luxury of summers off. No work (except self-imposed math review to prepare for the fall), long evenings, trips to the beach, and ample free time to read. So what do I read? Well, choosing a book has been harder than I thought. My main goal for a beach read is to avoid using too many brain cells while not killing any, either. And I prefer fiction for vacation, although I readily concede that there are many fine non-fiction books that meet the above criteria. Being a person of extremes, I have struggled to find the sweet, narrow middle ground between chick-lit and The Brothers Karamazov.

My strategy was to recall the authors from my high school English classes or the authors of classic novels that I had memorized from my Academic Team days (the nerdiness goes waaaay back). A book with high quality writing and a decent plot that would make a ninth-grader’s head hurt seemed just the ticket, so I headed down to my local library to browse the stacks. After failing to find a few titles, I recalled how much I enjoyed My Antonia by Willa Cather and decided to see if there were more of her work checked in. When I saw O Pioneers!, I knew what my next read would be.

Set on the Nebraska frontier (the same setting as My Antonia), O Pioneers! chronicles the life of Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson, who came to the frontier as a child. Alexandra is fated to run the family farm after her father’s untimely death (and her brothers’ general ineptitude in business matters) but accepts her lot with grace and humility. To say much more would probably give too much away, but suffice it to say that book explores Alexandra’s relationships—relationships with family, community, the past, the land, and ultimately herself.

I marvel at the way that Cather was able to craft a tale worth reading about such an ordinary existence. This fact is, in my opinion, a testament to Cather’s writing skill. Where she shines the brightest, however, is in her incredibly vivid descriptions of the Nebraska landscape. I have never been to Nebraska and cannot vouch for any degree of accuracy, but I can say that I felt the landscape. I could imagine myself there—in the orchard on a dewey summer morning, half frozen in a horse-drawn cart in the dead of winter, and walking through a field at sunset.

Some turns of events were predictable, which I did not mind. O Pioneers! is not a who-done-it, and I was not reading it for the thrill of solving the puzzle. Rather, I read it to vicariously experience life in another time and place, and that is what I got—an enjoyable, predictable trip to the Nebraska frontier.

Survival Mode versus Learning Mode

My history collection has been waiting for me.

Once upon a time, I completed a history degree from one of our country’s most esteemed liberal arts colleges. Indeed, I am privileged to share an alma mater with multiple presidents, founding fathers, and elder statesmen. I didn’t just study history—I was surrounded by it. Being both a bibliophile and a recovering pack-rat, I have thus amassed quite a nice collection of high-quality history books, which I have recently been purging. Surely as the proud owner and presumed reader of said books I must have learned quite a bit, you ask. Well, no. I know squat about history, and you know why? Because I was in survival mode, not learning mode.

My first college degree didn’t go quite as well as planned for various and sundry reasons that I may enumerate at a later date. Or not. We’ll see. Long story short, I ended up having to switch my major from biology to history halfway through my junior year with zero history credits under my belt. At that point, I was focused on passing and graduating and simply didn’t have the bandwidth to learn much of anything. But I got a second chance at college and am now studying for a science degree with the goal of completing the prerequisites for med school. That’s a different post for a different day.

One of the best parts of being a non-traditional student is that I have a totally different perspective on learning and higher education. This time, I don’t have to learn—I get to learn. And what a privilege that is! Don’t get me wrong—going to school the first time was an enormous privilege, but I didn’t have the tools at the time to make the most of the opportunity. Now I get a second chance at something that I’ve always wanted, and I’m getting so much more out of it.

When you focus on learning, the good grades come as a natural result of being genuinely engaged with the content. As a rule, I remember things that interest me, so if I just focus on that aspect of the material, I’m usually good. Panicking about grades only robs my mind of energy that I could be using the learn, and learning makes me very happy indeed. Learning makes me feel alive.

Sometimes it puzzles me when my young classmates are complaining about their workload or concepts that I think are really, really cool (Hess’s Law is so elegant! Asymptotes are beautiful!) Then I remember that I was once in their shoes, totally overwhelmed by life when I didn’t even have one yet. Perspective is something that only comes with time and experience. I find myself thinking, “Wow, all I had to do back then was study, and I totally blew it!” But that experience of blowing it has paradoxically given me an energy and drive that I couldn’t fathom as an eighteen-year-old.

Now that I don’t have to read all of these history books, I can’t wait to read them. A few years ago I dipped back into a book on the French Annales School by Peter Burke, and I’m particularly excited to revisit The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers and The Knight, the Lady and the Priest by Georges Duby. If you, too, are interested in learning instead of just getting a passing grade (or maybe you’re done with school but just want to read), I highly recommend How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

If you have an opportunity to learn, don’t waste it—embrace it. Happy reading and learning, friends!

PS—If you’re not into nonfiction, I highly recommend the authors Liane Moriarty and David Sedaris. Moriarty does insightful and funny chick-lit set in Australia, and Sedaris is an American humorist.